Burned by Billionaires: Excerpt
This excerpt from Chuck Collins’ new book Burned by Billionaires includes examples of rule changes that would lift people out of poverty, increase economic security for the precarious, and reduce inequality.
This excerpt from Chuck Collins’ new book Burned by Billionaires includes examples of rule changes that would lift people out of poverty, increase economic security for the precarious, and reduce inequality.
Chuck Collins returns to Crazy Town to offer insights from his new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.
We really believe that degrowth is a more complex, substantial and significant concept and movement than its treatment in the Hickel interview. We think that the degrowth movement has a very important role to play in the challenging political context.
So, it is not the case that the market’s functioning is a reflection on who we are and how we choose to behave, how we meet our needs. We do not need to be homo economicus for the market to thrive.
As official efforts faltered, amid aging equipment and crumbling infrastructure, Syrian civil society moved quickly to support the afflicted farmers, forming emergency networks that sent hundreds of volunteers into the fire zones to deliver supplies and support where government services could not reach.
I’m convinced that the more people experience the humanizing benefits of direct connections and mutual support, the more bridges can be built in the future. We can learn by doing. As the saying goes, we can act our way into different ways of thinking more easily than we can think our way into new ways of acting.
We can start with the concept of sharing, of commoning, and then try to work out together how we can common the land and potentially, what’s produced on it. It’s anarchic in the sense that it’s massively decentralised, with lots of tiny nodes that together can provide the clothing and textiles that we need to live.
As the ecological situation worsens, we don’t have the luxury of snubbing potential solutions. Let’s not be the ones who died of an illness because the name of the remedy sounded silly.
Do we blindly feed our consumption addiction, indifferent to how—or whether—resources can be replenished? Or do we transition from consumer to replenisher, and become responsible stewards, ensuring that what we take today will sustain life tomorrow?
Here, perhaps is the secret to also countering the far right, not with ameliorative green growthism but with radical, redistributive, anti-commodity leftism – recovering that underground tradition of socialism that starts from a critique of capitalism’s turning everything into a commodity, and instead focusing on what we all need to lead a decent dignified life, within safe limits.
If a theoretical economy relies on the exchange of intended things, a profitable economy relies on the waste produced by the production, distribution and sale of those things.
In tandem with the 80th United Nations General Assembly, we’re asking a vital question: where do we find hope at such a challenging time? And the answer is in our cities.